Alison Lurie - The Nowhere City

Iz did not answer, except with one of those steady silences she had learned to understand as a refusal to comment. With an impatient movement, he pulled the bolster out from under her head, and put his open mouth to hers.

“When I remember that you thought you weren’t very interested in sex, I have to laugh, Katherine,” he said presently, laughing. “How many times did you just come? Three?” His chest shook. “Am I too heavy on you?”

“No, I like it.” Katherine laid her hand on his shoulder. Even here there was a light growth of curly hair, now damp with sweat, like grass after a storm. “Iz. What I want to know is—Why does it work for me with you, and not with Paul?”

“That’s an interesting question,” he said, pulling up a tweed cushion so he could rest his arm on it. “Why do you think?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it’s partly because you, well, force me. I mean, of course I don’t have to come here. And I still do have all kinds of trouble about that; even today I stood in front of your building for about five minutes trying to decide whether to run away. ... But then, once I’m with you, I know that no matter what I do you’ll make me sleep with you. It’s completely settled, so I don’t have to worry or feel responsible. ... And I trust you. And then—” Katherine stared across the room at the window, but could see nothing of the city except for scraps of sky between the plants.

“Ya, so then?” he encouraged her. The psychiatrist’s phrase and intonation sounded odd in this position; Katherine smiled.

“Well, then, it’s as if what I do here doesn’t really count. I mean, Los Angeles is so far away from everywhere and everything here is so peculiar, it’s as if it weren’t real.”

“And I am so peculiar.”

“You know what I mean.” Katherine laughed. “By Cambridge standards, you are.”

“And reality is judged always by Cambridge standards?” Iz propped his head on his hands and looked down into Katherine’s face.

“I don’t know.” She smiled. “Maybe if I were with you long enough, I’d begin to see everything your way.” It would be like when she used to lie upside down to drain her sinuses, she thought, when after a while she would begin to imagine that the furniture was fastened to the ceiling, and she could walk along underneath it over a white plaster floor from which lighting fixtures grew like strange plants. Only she didn’t have sinus attacks now.

“I hope not; I don’t want you to exchange one tyranny for another simply. That’s no solution. Uh.” Iz raised himself off Katherine, sighing, and lay down beside her, next to the wall, fitting himself to the curve of her hip.

“But I thought you wanted me to be influenced by your ideas. I thought that was the whole point,” Katherine said half-seriously “Isn’t that what’s supposed to happen in—” she hesitated, and chose one of Iz’s neutral terms—“a relationship like this? Almost like when people get married.”

“I don’t know what you mean by ‘supposed to happen.’” He laughed. “I’m against institutionalized love affairs. I’m against all institutions, you know that—including the institution of marriage.” He swung up his arm to within a few inches of his face, squinted at his wristwatch, smiled, and let it fall again. “You understand, it’s the job of an anarchist to break up all authoritarian systems. With us, adultery is a matter of principle.”

“But you have been married,” Katherine reminded him.

“Yes,” Iz admitted. “Occasionally I’ve made that mistake. ... I’ve let myself become involved, and been hurt, and all of that. So, we all make mistakes, even us anarchists.” He grinned.

Katherine laughed too, wondering how seriously he meant it. One could never be sure, with Iz. Meanwhile, silently, he began to trace the outline of her back with his finger.

“And how is your husband these days?” he asked.

“Oh, all right. I don’t know. He’s been talking about going back into teaching. I think he must be tired of his job.”

“Ya?” Iz’s hand moved further down, drawing the line of Katherine’s white hip and thigh against the dark tweed of the analytic couch. “A question occurs to me,” he said. “Why has Paul, apparently so healthy, so extroverted, etcetera, why has this man chosen the academic life?” Used now to Iz’s rhetorical questions, Katherine simply waited. “Answer, because he is basically unfree and dependent on existing patterns. He has to feel part of some benign system that will smile on his little adventures. Or frown, perhaps.”

“But Paul’s not the scholarly type at all,” Katherine objected rather stupidly. The truth was, no matter how angry she felt at her husband, and discouraged about her marriage, it annoyed her obscurely that Iz should sum him up this way.

“Not externally.” Iz did not press his point; he moved his fingers along Katherine, thinking.

“I brought my shorthand notebook,” she said, smiling as she noticed it sticking out of her bag across the room. “I thought you really wanted to dictate something.”

“Ya, I ought to. But let’s forget it.” Iz continued the outline.

“Mm. ... You know, I never do any work for you any more. It’s really awful, considering I’m being paid so much an hour by the grant. We’re exploiting them dreadfully.”

“Foundations exist to be exploited.” Gently, Iz drew a series of fine parallel lines across Katherine with his nails.

“And it’s not only you. I’m not really working very much for Charlie or Bert either. Even when you’re not there now, I just sit up in the office sometimes in a kind of daze. I guess—-” She stopped; Iz said nothing. “I guess maybe I’m getting too involved to work,” she concluded, almost in a whisper.

“You’re not as involved as you think you are,” Iz replied after a short pause. “Or let’s put it this way; you’re deeply involved in the experience, that’s true; but your commitment to me as an individual is not so very great. Do you really want to know what I think?” He raised his head to look at her. “Are you comfortable?”

“Yes. Go on.”

“All right. I think it’s easier for you to let yourself go with me because I’m not a man of your own class and background. I’m a foreigner ... a—what shall I say?—Wandering Jew, with a beard and an accent. In one sense, what you have with me is the kind of thing well-to-do women look for, perhaps not quite consciously, when they go abroad on a tour. Under those circumstances they can have what they call a “romantic interlude,” even a very intense one, without feeling they’re really deceiving their husbands. ... I don’t mean to imply this is only a phenomenon of the middle class. It’s the same thing with the little housewife who figures it doesn’t really count when she lets the plumber push her up against the basement wall some afternoon.”

“No. That’s just not true!” Katherine exclaimed. “I don’t think of you as a foreigner or a plumber. I know you’re a very intelligent, highly educated professional man.”

Iz laughed. “The way you say that proves it. Don’t be simple-minded, Katherine. You know what I’m talking about. You were saying almost the same thing yourself earlier.”

In silence, Katherine admitted to herself that she did, although of course Iz had put it much, much too crudely. “All right,” she said. “And you know what I was talking about too. About working for you and that. Because it does worry me, really. You know.” She looked at him. He smiled; slightly nodded.

“All right. I will give my serious consideration to your problem,” he replied in his professional manner. “Ahh.” He yawned and, raising himself, leaned across Katherine’s body and felt about on the floor with wide, half-blind gestures. Then he found his glasses, sat up, and put them on—changing at once from a naked and bearded satyr to a small, middle-European man at a nudist camp. This man looked at his watch.